Any procurement or asset management professionals who have seen the new movie based on E.L.James’ best selling novels may have noticed the similarity between the eponymous antihero and a license management services consultant. Mr. Grey will use charm and threats to persuade you to run his audit scripts on your network. You have an obligation to demonstrate your compliance with the software license terms, but that doesn't mean that you have accept his opinion about what those terms actually mean.

Sources inside some large software companies tell me that license audits generate 20% to 30% of their license revenue. Although a lot of that will represent deliberate or reckless under-licensing, many of the disputes that I hear about involve software salespeople abusing some licensing shades of grey to pressurize customers into paying them money. It is difficult to predict how a court will interpret nineties contract language in the current technology context, so many companies pay up rather than risk a compliance lawsuit. Here are five questions of interpretation that no lawyer can answer:

Who is really using my software? I continue to hear risible interpretations of ‘use’ and ‘access’, such as the software company that claimed motorists were users because they saw output from its database when they drove past an electronic road sign. I’ve previously suggested a standard interpretation of use in my report Let's Clear Up The "Indirect Access" Mess based on the concept of interaction - i.e. both input by a user and output by the software. Enterprises need to persuade their vendors to accept this interpretation urgently, otherwise the Internet Of Things will bankrupt you.

Previously Microsoft tried to discourage customers from using virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) on top of rival operating systems by applying complex licensing rules involving various TLAs such as RUR, VDA and CSL (which I’m not going to explain here, because they are, thankfully, no longer needed). The USL is far simpler - clear Windows licensing replacing translucent frosted glass, so to speak.

Clients tell us they are turning to SaaS not so much for cost savings but primarily for greater business results: greater business agility and improved collaboration inside and outside the enterprise. But, what can SaaS applications provide that traditional, single tenant applications cannot?

At last week’s Workday Technology Summit, we heard firsthand from some major brands about the unique benefits they are achieving from using a SaaS solution:

Categories:

I was invited to speak at the Big Data and Business Analytics Forum in Hong Kong last week, and introduced our latest research on big data in Asia Pacific for both marketing and technology management professionals in the age of the customer. Listening to other speakers at the event who discussed Hadoop and explained the 4Vs of big data — volume, velocity, variety, and value — it dawned on me that there may be a significant gap in big data development between mainland China and Hong Kong. While Hong Kong is perceived as more technologically advanced, these terms were already buzzwords on the mainland 18 months ago. There are several constraints could have hindered big data adoption in Hong Kong:

Demographic limitations. With a total population of 7 million, Hong Kong doesn’t generate data volumes as gigantic as mainland China’s. This raises the unit cost of big data for Hong Kong businesses.

Budget to invest in new technologies. Hong Kong businesses are still struggling to recover from the 2008 financial crisis and maintain hiring freezes. It’s difficult for tech management to convince business leaders to invest over HK$1 million in a big data project and hire data scientists.

There are few local practices in unstructured data like social, location, and mobile. Hong Kong is open to global social platforms like Facebook or Twitter, meaning that multinationals can use global big data solutions to cover social in Hong Kong and keeping local adoption of big data technology for SoLoMo low.

JD.com, the second largest online retailer in China, went public on May 22, listing itself on Nasdaq after merely 11 years of existence. At the time of IPO, JD had a market value of nearly $30 billion. Despite its size however, JD still managed to increase its customer base by 62% in 2013. How did JD manage to continually achieve business growth? I believe this is due to three key factors that differentiate JD:

■ Comprehensive logistics network for online retail in China. JD.com invested heavily in a last-mile strategy to ensure that customers receive products as quickly as possible, establishing 82 local warehouses with 1,620 delivery and 214 pickup stations across nearly 500 cities in China. This has made same-day delivery available in 43 cities — far ahead of the capabilities of Google Shopping Express in San Francisco. To better reach customers in lower-tier cities, JD is also collaborating with local convenience store chains in provinces like Shanxi and Guangdong to further strengthen its last-mile delivery capability.

At the Cisco Live Event 2014 in San Francisco last week, we heard about plenty of updates, extensions, and new acquisitions to expand the business. The major technologies highlighted were InterCloud, Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), and the Internet of Everything (IoE). Among these new offerings, I reveal that Cisco’s extended big data and analytics capabilities excited me the most. Why? Because its data virtualization techniques can help customers easily analyze large volumes of virtual data, no matter where it physically resides; enhanced video analytics technology could improve the customer experience when checking out in retail stores or waiting for a train; while IoE analytics and digital intelligence increase customer engagement.

Data virtualization supports big data analytics. End user organizations realize the importance of quickly and carefully making decisions; to do this, they plan to centralize data from different branch offices or departments. Consolidating data that resides in multiple systems and in global locations — or that is locked away in spreadsheets — is expensive. For example, telecom operators in China have hundreds of millions subscribers and need to consolidate and analyze this customer data — but it resides in 31 provincial companies. Data consolidation will be a huge and expensive project, but data virtualization technology can help solve this problem. Customers could consider adding Cisco to their data virtualization vendor shortlist, especially given Cisco’s acquisition of Composite Software last July.

Have you ever wondered if your home broadband is being effectively utilized? What if you could squeeze more out of your data allowance when outside your home? Telstra may have cracked this problem in Australia: It will invest more than A$100 million to build a nationwide Wi-Fi network as part of a strategy to increase connectivity in the places Australians live, work, and visit, including cafes, shops, sports grounds, and transport hubs.

The strategy aims to offer all Australians — whether or not they’re Telstra customers — access to 2 million Wi-Fi hotspots across the nation within five years. Telstra home broadband customers can install new gateways that allow them to securely share a portion of their bandwidth with other Telstra Wi-Fi customers in exchange for broadband access at Telstra hotspots across the nation. Non-Telstra customers can purchase daily hotspot access. The network, scheduled to launch in early 2015, will also reach overseas; an exclusive deal recently concluded between Telstra and global Wi-Fi provider Fon will allow people to connect at more than 12 million hotspots worldwide.

What It Means

Telstra has been at the forefront of improving the telco customer experience; its CEO, David Thodey, has been a major driving force behind that. This has put Telstra’s local competitors on notice and provides valuable lessons in how to raise the customer experience game:

June is a such great month – the days are getting warmer, Wimbledon merges tennis with strawberries and cream, the kids are all pleasantly subdued while revising and sitting exams, the football World Cup is just around the corner, and (how could we possibly forget) it’s also Microsoft’s financial year end.

Many of you will already be in the throes of a negotiation with Microsoft for an Enterprise Agreement (EA) renewal. Or perhaps you are looking at the pros/cons of their Office 365 solution. If you’re planning to take the negotiation to the wire on June 30th in order to squeeze the very best deal at Microsoft’s year end, be aware that Microsoft would like you to dance to a different tune. They are pushing really hard to complete negotiations sooner rather than later. In fact, you might well have been told that Friday, June 20th is their deadline.

Microsoft will tell you that they need a few working days to get signed paperwork through their internal system in order to formally book the deal. While there is some truth in this, it’s also true that the Microsoft sales rep and their reseller doesn’t get commission until the deal has been booked and the revenue formally recognized – hence the pressure to get stuff signed by the 20th!

Whichever date you choose to conclude your negotiation, rest assured that the later it is in June then the more stressed your Microsoft rep will become.

Here are four tips to think about while you negotiate with Microsoft in June:

My recent report, “Driving Toward Communications Sourcing Excellence,” looks behind the scenes to find out why Formula One (F1) sourcing professionals enjoy such a great customer experience from their network providers. It’s a two-way street: Providers ensure that the F1 team’s network is reliable, always available, and delivers peak performance when needed, and F1 sourcing pros provide the guidance, insight, and support to make sure providers know what teams need. This is as much a concern for CIOs as it is for sourcing pros in their quest to win, serve, and retain customers.

Matt Cadieux, the CIO of Infiniti Red Bull Racing, said, “AT&T has a dedicated F1 account team that I meet for regular account reviews to discuss our requirements and plans. In the rare event of a problem, we also have excellent relationships with AT&T’s top executives. AT&T has consistently delivered projects when required; for example, in 2014 it provisioned new access networks in England and France and at racetracks around the world. These circuits have been fully operational — we show up and they just work.”

What It Means

My colleague Tracy Stokes believes that a consistent customer experience builds a trusted brand, and I couldn’t agree more. It also leads to:

It’s been an interesting few weeks for Microsoft. XP has gone off Support and left many clients exposed to security risks. At the same time, the US Government has just warned all users to avoid using Internet Explorer (IE) versions 6 to 11 as they say that there is a serious flaw that hackers are already apparently exploiting.

Against this backdrop, Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s newly minted CEO, joined Microsoft’s recent earnings call to talk about the ‘courage’ they will exhibit as they move forward. Let’s hope that courage includes supporting clients who find themselves in difficulty from product flaws.

Microsoft reported earnings were $6.97 billion on revenue of $20.4 billion; this is roughly flat with a year ago. But this third quarter fiscal 2014 earnings call might be more memorable for the fact that the company's CEO was on the call than for anything about the earnings report itself. Nadella spent an hour on the analyst call on April 24 talking Microsoft strategy and answering Wall Street analyst questions. That's something former CEO Steve Ballmer rarely did.

While Nadella didn't make any major announcements, he did drop a few hints that might tell us more about his plans and where Microsoft may be going.

"What you can expect of Microsoft is courage in the face of reality, we will approach our future with a challenger mind set," Nadella told analysts. Here are a few challenges that spring to my mind; cumbersome and sometimes conflicting contractual paperwork, product divisions working in isolation from each other, Google and IBM competing hard in the email/collaboration/cloud space, having to cut Azure prices to more closely align to Apple and Amazon, and a frustratingly slow start in the tablet space.